Thursday, December 29, 2011

Paul's Epistles

For a while, like a good portion of the rest of the country, I have watched as Ron Paul has quietly become the voice of reason in the Republican Party. "Quietly" because he has been able to hang on the edge of the race to his party's nomination without getting the kind of scrutiny that many of the other front-runners have achieved, and wilted under. Herman Cain couldn't take it. Sarah Palin, true to form, quit before she ever got started. Remember when Donald Trump was going to run as a Republican? Gary Johnson, part of the "who's that again" faction, announced that he would be dropping out of the Republican primaries to run as a Libertarian.
Odd, since that's where you might expect to find Ron Paul. His anti-war, isolationist views are raising interest that sound more at home on another platform, rather than under the bright lights of the Reagan Library with the rest of the assembled Avengers. He appeals to Tea Partiers and Occupiers. He's the anti-candidate. He's also all about cutting the fat off our nation's budget. To the bone: an immediate, one trillion dollar spending cut that would slash the federal budget by more than one-third and eliminate the departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Interior, and Housing and Urban Development. If Rick Perry is looking in, that's six departments he would get rid of, doubling his cuts if he could only remember what they were.
Ron Paul is also preparing for Armageddon. That's pretty forward thinking, since the Mayans have predicted that the world will end shortly after Election Day 2012. Paul's version is less like a John Cusack movie and more Orwellian. "I'm afraid of violence coming," he told a crowd of more than six hundred in Bettendorf, Iowa. "When you see what the government is preparing for, and the arrests and military law, and the demonstrations in the streets, some people aren't going to be convinced so easily that you don't owe them a living." The Federal Reserve must go. He worries that the United States is about to surrender control of its own currency to the United Nations.
Then there's this: "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
"We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational."
After the Los Angeles riots, "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks."
Referring to Martin Luther King Jr. as "the world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours" and who "seduced underage girls and boys."
To Barbara Jordan, a civil rights activist and congresswoman as "Barbara Morondon," the "archetypical half-educated victimologist."
These quotes come from newsletters that bore his name and credentials in the eighties and nineties. Back in 1996 he took responsibility for their content, but now claims that they were all written by a ghost writer whose name he cannot recall.
Well, that's nice. At least he's starting to sound more like a real Republican again.

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